The Movies gets its first expansion with Stunts and Effects. Like Hollywood itself, new technologies and gimmicks have to be developed to effectively capture the audience's attention. The expansion overall makes The Movies a more complete game, introducing stunt crew members who can be assigned to movies. There are also a host of new sets and effects which bring the feel of the game closer to what people can expect from today's move-making capabilities.

This expansion's most obvious addition is that of stuntmen, who literally bring some extra bang to your feature films. A dedicated facility needs to be built to hire stunt workers using people from your available labor pool. These new characters work a little differently than the rest of the crew. When a film is in pre-production, stunt workers can be assigned to cover specific actors. The player needs to pay attention to two aspects: Stunt skill and condition. Stunt skill is pretty straightforward. It basically shows how advanced your stunts can get, and the skill can be improved by putting him or her through different training facilities. Condition is almost like a fatigue meter. The more banged up your stuntmen are when performing or training, the lower their condition will be. This is resolved by letting them rest or sending them to the hospital (also new) to get fixed up. Every stuntman has a chance of success or failure for any given stunt, dictated by their skill and condition. A low condition will increase the chance of a stunt failing, which ultimately ends up in the final cut of the movie, and could possibly lower the movie's score. Perhaps that means that in The Movies, there's no such thing as second takes. Stuntmen can be used as stand-ins for actual actors, but their genre experience accumulates much slower than a real star's.

Getting a script using stunts is no problem. The moment you finish building a stunt school, a small circle with a helmet will appear in the corner of your writers' offices. When you drag a writer onto this icon, they will start including some sort of stunt into the script. Luckily, the difficulty of these stunts will never be higher than your stuntmen's skill. Including your first stunt will be like opening Pandora's Box. Once the audience gets a taste of stunts, they'll want more. You'll have to compete with other studios to include bigger, more fantastic stunts, and things continue to escalate from there. The problem with doing a movie with Stunts is that it can easily take twice as long to shoot one than a straightforward film. This quickly wears down the patience of many of your actors, directors, and crew. Furthermore, the inclusion of stunt workers significantly boosts up the amount of micromanaging you have to do. Now, in addition to trying to keep your Stars and Directors happy in the usual way and dealing with their problems (like alcoholism), you now need to train and maintain a crew of stunt workers on top of building and maintaining your movie studio. It would have been nice if there were controls to automate character initiatives so that you wouldn't have to constantly hunt individuals down and make sure they're training.

While Stunts and Effects improves The Movies by giving it a stronger feel with technologies closer to what we expect from today's movies, certain frustrating gameplay aspects have remain unchanged. The biggest problem is still the absurdly limited labor pool. There never seemed to be enough workers available to keep a studio running smoothly before the expansion, and it doesn't get any better now that there are new characters to train. The player will be lucky to put together a small stunt crew, which will almost always be put to work because stunts with scripts take so long to shoot. This also means that there is less opportunity for stunt workers to recover condition and train up their skills. It will be a rare occasion when you have enough crew to work on two or more stunt movies at the same time. Points can be deducted if a stunt double isn't a good enough match in physique, gender, and age to the actor. Luckily, the expansion comes with a comparison tool to see how the pair measure up. Ultimately, players will be forced to use simpler movies as a staple in order to keep revenue coming in while stunt movies will be reserved for the blockbuster hits. When you think of how many workers are available to do any given job in the real Hollywood, it seems completely absurd that manpower is your most limited resource. In a pinch, real actors can be used to perform their own stunts, and the audience loves it when actors do their own stunts, but they have a higher chance of failure. A failed stunt will mean that these divas will become even more irritable.

As the title of the expansion states, stunts are a big addition to the game, but so are the new sets which include blue and green screens which allow for incredible freedom in setting up the backdrop of your movie. The miniature city makes it possible for long aerial shots of the city and gives giant monsters a place to stomp. Lastly, the scrolling landscape set adds further depth to any given film by enabling chase scenes. A new free camera mode has been included for the custom movie maker, which doesn't actually impact the game, since you don't get scored any better for a custom movie than you do a packaged movie. This ability was clearly put in for those who want to use the game as a kind of home movie tool.

When all is said and done, the Stunts and Effects expansion makes The Movies a more complete package. It's a must-have for those who enjoy the game. It's too bad major flaws like the extremely limited worker pool haven't been addressed, because the problem gets magnified with the inclusion of the expansion.